April 8, 2022 - UMD Senate approves policy to enhance equitable access to scholarly publications.
July 16, 2021 - UMD PACT releases a position paper on journal subscriptions and Big Deals."
July, 7, 2017 - University System of Maryland issues a statement supporting open access dissemination of scholarship.
May 27, 2021 - UMD Libraries adopt core licensing principles to guide negotiations with scholarly publishers and other vendors.
May 5, 2021 - UMD Libraries become the institutional home for SocArXiv, an interdisciplinary open access repository of scholarship hosted by the Center for Open Science. More information is available on the press announcement.
April 2021 - UMD Libraries launch TOME@UMD (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a national initiative to advance open-access publishing of monographs in the humanities and social sciences.
February 2021 - The University of Maryland, as part of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), has entered into a three-year collective action agreement with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This agreement offers support for DOAJ, an online directory that indexes and promotes quality, peer-reviewed open access journals from around the world, providing a community-driven service to play an essential role in the creation of a sustainable model for the future of scholarly publishing. This independent database contains over 15,000 peer-reviewed, open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
April 2020 - UMD PACT working group, a subgroup of the University Library Council, forms to investigate a new framework for licensing of scholarly content and the means by which more equitable access to UMD's scholarly publishing and data can be achieved.
April 2014 - As part of the Future of the Research Library Speaker Series, Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, speaks to the UMD campus on "The Evolution of Open Access: What Might Happen Next."
December 2013 - Dan Mack, UMD Libraries Director of Collections, is interviewed on Higher Education Today. He is joined by Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, and they discuss academic publishing, open access and collection budgets.
August 2013 - University of Maryland Libraries establishes the Open Access Publishing Fund.
February 22, 2013 - University of Maryland signs the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
February 20, 2013 - President Loh approves the Report of the Joint Provost/Senate Open Access Task Force.
October 10, 2012 - Dean of the Libraries, Patricia Steele, addresses the University Senate: Open Access at Maryland - Is it Time?
April 3, 2012 - The Joint Provost/Senate Open Access Task Force is formed and charged to determine how the University can best address open access issues.
April 7, 2011 - The University Senate approves the recommendations outlined in the University Library Council report "The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing and the Open Access Movement." The report recommends the formation of a scholarly communications / publishing task force.
April 23, 2009 - The University Senate rejected the Resolution on Open Access to Scholarly Publications sponsored by the Senate Faculty Affairs Committee.
April 17, 2008 - UMD Library Assembly passes resolution to urge librarians to publish in open access journals. As part of the resolution, funds were established to pay author fees.
August 2004 - DRUM (Digital Repository at the University of Maryland) is established.
Open Access generally means "available freely to the public via the Internet," which the Budapest Open Access Initiative defines as "permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."
Generally speaking, there are two approaches to providing open access:
1) Self-archiving involves the direct deposit of scholarly works into an open repository such as DRUM. It is not a publishing method and its express purpose is to make information as accessible as possible. Self-archived works may be published, to-be-published (pre- and post-prints), or unpublished (many theses and conference papers). This route to open access is known as the Green Road.
2) Publishing in open access journals allows full text access for free. This route is called the Gold Road and complements - does not replace - the Green Road.
Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.
Delayed Open Access: Journal articles are freely available after a period of paid access, anywhere from 6 to 12 months, expires.
Short-term Open Access: Free access to journal articles is provided for a short time after publication, after which access is only available to subscribers.
Selected Open Access: Selected journal articles are freely available, while the remaining articles are accessible by subscription.
Hybrid Open Access: Authors are given the option to pay a publication fee to make their article freely available immediately on publication.
Partial Open Access: The primary research articles of a journal are made freely available, but access to other value-added content such as editorials and review articles requires a subscription.
Total Open Access: All the articles in a journal are free and accessible on the Internet. Article processing fees are usually required to cover the costs of peer-review and online publication and are paid by the author, the author's institution, or the author's research grant. Many open access journals offer institutional memberships where, based on the level of membership, article processing fees are either reduced or waived.
Andrew Bonamici's (U of Oregon) blog post: Avoiding Scams.
Butler, Declan. "Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing." Nature 495, no. 7442 (27 March 2013). Includes a checklist to identify reputable publishers.
Jeffrey Beall's Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers. Also includes a list of "predatory" publishers and individual journals.